Hip Hop and the Politics of Il-Literacy part 2 by H. Samy Alim Lyrics
HIP HOP PEDAGOGIES AND ILL-LITERACIES
Thus far, I have described the politics of youth ill-literacies and the challenges they might pose for language and education policies. Not only do traditional views ignore the wealth of cultural and linguistic resources that diverse youth bring to the class- room but they also stand in opposition to youth ideologies of language and literacy. As such, they are based on closing down rather than opening up multiple possibilities for robust learning to occur. In the remainder of this chapter, I focus on the pedagogical possibilities that scholars open up as they engage youth ill-literacies. I also offer some caveats and point to a number of directions for future research.
Much of the research covers the specific ill-literacy practices of Hip Hop and Spoken Word. These studies build upon a tradition of research in education, literacy studies, sociolinguistics, and pedagogies of popular culture that views literacies as social practices that are multiple, varied, and exist within diverse sociocultural contexts and discourses (Gee, 1996; Heath, 1983). Many anthropologists of education utilize the framework of the ethnography of communication (Hymes, 1972) to drive home the message that diverse students often possess “different, not deficient” language and literacy practices in the communities within which they were socialized (Ochs and Schieffelin, 1984; Philips, 1970; see also Bartlett et al.,
Chapter 10; Gonzaléz, Wyman, and O’Connor, Chapter 28; and Baquedano-Lopéz and Hernandez, Chapter 12).
Two notable examples are Heath’s (1983) classic, decade-long study, which demonstrated how families from Black and White working-class communities social- ize their children into varying language and literacy practices, and Zentella’s (1997) pioneering, 14-year ethnography of the rich and complex linguistic repertoires of Puerto Rican children in New York, who displayed skills in five different language varieties of Spanish and English. Heath and Zentella, among others, noted that cer- tain literacy practices were actually closer to those practices valued by schools, and that in the case of Black and Puerto Rican working-class children (ironically, the very children who were busy creating a linguistically-driven global Hip Hop nation), their practices were not sufficiently “understood” or “rewarded” (Zentella, 1997: 1). Zen- tella, in particular, offered a more politicized approach and called for an exploration of the “stigmatization of difference” (p. 276) as a source of schools’ failure to read cul- tural and linguistic diversity.
The “New Literacy Studies” (Hull and Schultz, 2002; Street, 1993) built upon this work and continued to pull away from non-critical research traditions in order to frame literacies as ideological, political, and situated within the social and cultural practices that are constitutive of everyday life (Hull and Schultz, 2002; see also Bar- tlett et al., Chapter 10). An increased focus on individual and institutional identities, ideologies, and sociopolitical processes re-directed literacy studies into a more critical arena. Alim (2004, 2005), Morrell and Duncan-Andrade (2004), Hill (2009), and Desai (2010) draw inspiration from the work of critical theorists (Apple, 1993; Freire, 1970; Freire and Macedo, 1987) in order to define “being literate” as being “present and active in the struggle for reclaiming one’s voice, history, and future” (Morrell and Duncan-Andrade, 2004: 249). The goal of critical literacies, then, is to enable students to “critique the hegemonic practices that have shaped their experiences and perceptions in order to free themselves from dominant ideologies, structures, and practices” (p. 250). This line of research has developed into “Critical Hip Hop Language Peda- gogies (CHHLPs)” (Alim, 2007), which work to “make the invisible visible” and examine the ways in which well-meaning educators attempt to silence “languages of color” in White public space by inculcating speakers of heterogeneous language varieties into what are, at their core, White ways of speaking and seeing the word/world – that is, the norms of White, middle-class, heterosexual males. As noted in Morrell and Duncan-Andrade (2004), to be literate is about more than reading the word, it’s about engaging in the process of “consciousness-raising,” that is, “the process of actively becoming aware of one’s own position in the world and, importantly, what to do about it” (Alim, 2004: xxiv).
These works and those that follow draw significant inspiration from Lee’s (1993, 2007) evolving theory of cultural modeling, which provides a framework for the design of curriculum that utilizes students’ cultural “funds of knowledge” (Moll et al., 1992) as a source for classroom learning. Ladson-Billings’ (1995, 1998) work on culturally relevant pedagogy and critical race theory in education, as well as Giroux’s (1996) and Dimitriadis’ (2001) work on popular cultural texts in (in) formal learning environments, are also central to this body of work. As Dimitriadis (2001) pointed out a decade ago, school culture has been eclipsed in kids’ lives by
media culture, precisely because media culture provides “models for self-fashioning that are ... now more compelling than the ones offered in traditional schools and through traditional curricula” (p. xi). When taken as a whole, Hip Hop pedagogies have moved beyond “gimmicky” approaches of using Hip Hop culture in the classroom and even more serious culturally relevant approaches by critiquing studies that exploit students’ local cultures, knowledges, and languages only in order to “take them somewhere else.” They view as problematic approaches that teach stu- dents some curricular “standard” or “canon,” without teaching the intrinsic value of students’ ill-literacies (Alim, 2007; Kirkland, 2008; Morrell and Duncan-Andrade, 2004). The field, in general, has moved beyond utilizing specific ill-literacy forms in the classroom (such as Hip Hop, Spoken Word, or other creative literacies) and has begun to centralize students’ lives in an effort to rethink the possibilities of public education. Recall that ILL refers to the notion that literacy instruction must be Intimate, Lived, and Liberatory if schools are to be effective in teaching marginalized populations.
Several recent book-length studies (Desai, 2010; Fisher, 2007; Hill, 2009; Low, 2010) provide models of how we might begin to rethink the purpose of public education and develop illiteracy pedagogies with a more critical, liberatory lens. The students and teacher in Fisher’s (2007) ethnography of an elective, high school Spoken Word poetry class in the Bronx, New York collectively “(re)defined literacy and what it meant to be literate using the medium of Spoken Word poetry” (p. 4). Through utilizing an “open mic” tradition, which is characterized by acts of reciprocity, Fisher described the processes by which teacher and students together built a literocracy by “emphasizing that language processes exist in partnership with action in order to guide young people to develop a passion for words and language” (Fisher, 2005: 92).
Desai’s (2010) ethnographic, teacher-researcher case study of Spoken Word poetry in a weekly after-school elective class in Los Angeles, California built upon Fisher (2005, 2007), Morrell and Duncan-Andrade (2004), and Jocson (2006) and framed Spoken Word as “a site/sight of resistance, reflection and rediscovery” (p. 1). Desai investigated Spoken Word as “a student-centered practice” that provides youth with a safe educational space to examine the world more critically by interrogating issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Desai frames Spoken Word as an “anti-colonial/ decolonizing” literacy practice that privileges “alternative forms of knowledge” by engaging students in “self-reflexive processes” (p. viii).
Hill (2009) and Low (2010) both celebrate the potential of using Hip Hop texts in the classroom, with Hill teaching “Hip Hop Lit,” a Hip Hop-centered English literature class in the evening education program of an alternative high school in South Philadelphia, and with Low co-teaching with and observing a White high school teacher, Tim, who offers a Hip Hop and Spoken Word course in a mid-sized city in the northeastern United States. In Hill’s (2009) terms, these pedagogies “inevitably create spaces of both voice and silence, centering and marginalization, empowerment and domination” (p. 10). Importantly, both Hill and Low push the envelope of “Hip Hop pedagogies,” along with Newman’s (2005) work, by not glossing over the tensions inherent between Hip Hop and schools (Low, 2010: 10). In fact, Low (2010) posits that it is these very real and difficult tensions around the
politics of race, gender, generation, class, and violence, for example, that simultaneously inhibit and demand Hip Hop’s use in schools.
In all of these studies, authors advocate an “intimate” engagement with Hip Hop culture. These pedagogies require particular levels of self-sharing, a process that was carefully negotiated by researchers in all of these studies. Fisher (2007) writes in several places about how her focus teacher (Joe) describes his Spoken Word poetry students as a “family” and the class as a “home,” where students “feed” each other through the reciprocal sharing of their fears, desires, dreams, and nightmares. Joe was often described as a “healer,” whose philosophy of learning connected literacy to “developing one’s full humanity” (p. 91). Similarly, Hill (2009) described the process of “wounded healing,” and Desai’s (2010) students describe the safe space created as a “catharsis” and a space for “healing.” The latter two studies discuss the ways that their classrooms were transformed upon their reciprocating personal narratives of anxiety about becoming fathers, wrestling with poverty, the possibility of abortion, etc. Low (2010) highlights one particular moment in Tim’s class – his genuine, reflexive narration of his internal battle with racism – as the reason that the dynamics of Tim’s classroom improved.
Given the impersonal nature of many of America’s large urban high schools (Noguera, 2003), the focus on intimacy is revolutionary in that it demands that learn- ing occur in safe spaces of reciprocity, mutual respect, and meaningful relationships with youth. All of these studies emphasize that students’ out-of-school lives are filled with struggle, but it is the building of reciprocal, caring relationships that allows students to be vulnerable, sometimes writing about the anxieties of being pregnant, undocumented, stereotyped, devastated by deception, losing loved ones, experiencing violence or abuse from family members or lovers, and other tragedies. Desai (2010) argues that we should not fear intimacy; rather, we should run towards it, as it allows us to view youth not just as students but as human beings with whom we share the world. In addition to intimacy, all of these studies highlight the need to utilize the “lived curriculum” of Hip Hop (Dimitriadis, 2001) in order to access the “lived experiences” of our students. In this way, I argue that recent work builds upon previous literacy studies by viewing students not merely as members of marginalized social groups but as individuals with hopes, fears, anxieties, and complicated lives outside of the classroom.
Finally, these studies view literacy as liberatory, not merely celebratory. For Joe, in Fisher (2007), mastering one’s life story is about re-writing the master narrative about urban youth of color and escaping the “higher mathematics of America” (p. 99) (i.e., the statistics on youth educational failure, imprisonment, etc.). She was not always sure, however, if students understood Joe’s “decolonizing” methodology, and some of their interview responses regarding “Bronxonics” (Joe’s term for the mixed language variety he and his students spoke) betrayed a limited critical language aware- ness, although certainly far greater than traditional approaches (p. 44). Literacy here is liberatory in the sense that it moves far beyond the mechanics of literacy and incor- porates the deeper meanings and relations of literacies to students’ lives. This under- standing of literacy also demands that we focus on ways to help students resist and challenge the forces and discourses that can potentially circumscribe their future possibilities (Gutiérrez, 2008).
HIP HOP AND THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF EDUCATION
In this final section, I want to briefly point to some caveats and then to directions for future studies. There are three main caveats that I would like to address, all of which might prevent ill-literacy studies from falling victim to their own critiques of previous literacy studies. First, there is a widespread tendency for Hip Hop pedagogies to sanitize Hip Hop for inclusion in schools. Many scholars, as pointed out in Low (2010), only use texts that are morally in line with progressive, middle-class, or even bourgeois politics and sensibilities. This is wildly different than an approach that begins with texts that youth, their peers, family, and community members are listen- ing to and creating themselves. Self-selecting “appropriate” texts runs the risk of being outright rejected as “boring,” “ancient,” or “confusing,” which occurred in some of these studies. Perhaps Hip Hop pedagogies could develop a broader, more nuanced understanding of Hip Hop that moves away from sociological and political interpretations which privilege socially and politically “conscious music,” and con- sider instead Perry’s (2004) theorizing of Hip Hop as a rare, democratic space where the sacred sits right alongside the profane, allowing for “open discourse” and prioritizing “expression” over “the monitoring of the acceptable” (pp. 5–6). Thus, rather than selecting Hip Hop texts that align with particular politics and sensibilities, and thereby run the risk of marginalizing students’ interpretations and uses of Hip Hop texts (which Dimitriadis, 2001, and Hill, 2009 have both shown to be impossible to predict), we might begin with explorations of the actual Hip Hop texts that our students make use of in their “lived experiences.” This is critical for anthropology of education’s engagement with Hip Hop.
Second, while all the studies reviewed here are highly receptive to and even laud- atory of Hip Hop texts, there is an apparent unease in some of the studies vis-à-vis the relations between Hip Hop texts and Spoken Word texts that are produced and consumed by youth. Building upon the first caveat, there is some acknowledgement that Spoken Word poetry is an “easier sell” than Hip Hop for schools, but we have to acknowledge the ways that our participation in this trend can make us com- plicit with the uncritical popular discourses that elevate “Spoken Word poetry” over “Hip Hop music,” thereby upholding the false binary of Spoken Word as “intellectual” and “conscious” and Hip Hop as “bling-bling” and “about nothing.” This bifurcating ideology emerges when teachers positively evaluate youth as “poets” when their rhymes align with institutionally-sanctioned behavior, and negatively evaluate them as “rappers” when they don’t. The danger in viewing these forms in this dichotomous fashion is that we undermine the “critical” mission of ill-literacies by demonstrating our own inability to discern popular culture’s contradictory cur- rents, the political economy of the Hip Hop culture industry, and the reductive representations of Black popular culture that have historically accompanied its commodification.
Future ill-literacy studies, my own included, must bear these possible contradictions in mind as we engage this very difficult, tense terrain of popular culture in the classroom. Second, there is a need for future studies to show more than the product of their success (such as student writing, poetry, and affirmation of researchers’
curricula through interviews) but also process (analyses of the difficult negotiation of teaching and learning the emerging curriculum). Several of these studies have done that well, but there is a need for more analysis of classroom interaction through discourse analytic techniques that examine, for example, not just that safe, critical spaces were achieved, but how and when we either were or were not successful in creating them. Illuminating cultural and educational processes is a central concern for the anthropology of education and needs further development in relation to Hip Hop practices.
In conclusion, the possibilities of global ill-literacies lie both in the politics and pedagogies of youth texts created largely outside of schools, and in our ability to create pedagogies inside schools that center the texts that our youth use, create, and manipulate in their daily lives. As this chapter has shown, the everyday pedagogies of Hip Hop range from the deliberate teaching of language mixing (Sarkar, 2007) and the focused learning of BESL in Canadian Hip Hop (Ibrahim, 2003), to the importing and transforming of various ideologies of race and inequality in new contexts (Pennycook and Mitchell, 2009; Roth-Gordon, 2009), to the articulation and contestation of multiple new identities in anticolonial resistive practices (Higgins, 2009; Omoniyi, 2009), to the pervasive process of localizing globally available cultural and linguistic forms (Alim, Ibrahim, and Pennycook, 2009). These examples not only create new possibilities for the theorizing of youth culture and language, they also demonstrate how teaching and learning happen in everyday life, even as we explore new ways to harness these processes in formal educational settings. The examples shared in this chapter open up new ways for us to think about education as both a process of the everyday and the everywhere, that is, learning through popular and everyday cultural practice across contexts, and as the specific processes of teaching and learning that occur in schools and classrooms.
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Thus far, I have described the politics of youth ill-literacies and the challenges they might pose for language and education policies. Not only do traditional views ignore the wealth of cultural and linguistic resources that diverse youth bring to the class- room but they also stand in opposition to youth ideologies of language and literacy. As such, they are based on closing down rather than opening up multiple possibilities for robust learning to occur. In the remainder of this chapter, I focus on the pedagogical possibilities that scholars open up as they engage youth ill-literacies. I also offer some caveats and point to a number of directions for future research.
Much of the research covers the specific ill-literacy practices of Hip Hop and Spoken Word. These studies build upon a tradition of research in education, literacy studies, sociolinguistics, and pedagogies of popular culture that views literacies as social practices that are multiple, varied, and exist within diverse sociocultural contexts and discourses (Gee, 1996; Heath, 1983). Many anthropologists of education utilize the framework of the ethnography of communication (Hymes, 1972) to drive home the message that diverse students often possess “different, not deficient” language and literacy practices in the communities within which they were socialized (Ochs and Schieffelin, 1984; Philips, 1970; see also Bartlett et al.,
Chapter 10; Gonzaléz, Wyman, and O’Connor, Chapter 28; and Baquedano-Lopéz and Hernandez, Chapter 12).
Two notable examples are Heath’s (1983) classic, decade-long study, which demonstrated how families from Black and White working-class communities social- ize their children into varying language and literacy practices, and Zentella’s (1997) pioneering, 14-year ethnography of the rich and complex linguistic repertoires of Puerto Rican children in New York, who displayed skills in five different language varieties of Spanish and English. Heath and Zentella, among others, noted that cer- tain literacy practices were actually closer to those practices valued by schools, and that in the case of Black and Puerto Rican working-class children (ironically, the very children who were busy creating a linguistically-driven global Hip Hop nation), their practices were not sufficiently “understood” or “rewarded” (Zentella, 1997: 1). Zen- tella, in particular, offered a more politicized approach and called for an exploration of the “stigmatization of difference” (p. 276) as a source of schools’ failure to read cul- tural and linguistic diversity.
The “New Literacy Studies” (Hull and Schultz, 2002; Street, 1993) built upon this work and continued to pull away from non-critical research traditions in order to frame literacies as ideological, political, and situated within the social and cultural practices that are constitutive of everyday life (Hull and Schultz, 2002; see also Bar- tlett et al., Chapter 10). An increased focus on individual and institutional identities, ideologies, and sociopolitical processes re-directed literacy studies into a more critical arena. Alim (2004, 2005), Morrell and Duncan-Andrade (2004), Hill (2009), and Desai (2010) draw inspiration from the work of critical theorists (Apple, 1993; Freire, 1970; Freire and Macedo, 1987) in order to define “being literate” as being “present and active in the struggle for reclaiming one’s voice, history, and future” (Morrell and Duncan-Andrade, 2004: 249). The goal of critical literacies, then, is to enable students to “critique the hegemonic practices that have shaped their experiences and perceptions in order to free themselves from dominant ideologies, structures, and practices” (p. 250). This line of research has developed into “Critical Hip Hop Language Peda- gogies (CHHLPs)” (Alim, 2007), which work to “make the invisible visible” and examine the ways in which well-meaning educators attempt to silence “languages of color” in White public space by inculcating speakers of heterogeneous language varieties into what are, at their core, White ways of speaking and seeing the word/world – that is, the norms of White, middle-class, heterosexual males. As noted in Morrell and Duncan-Andrade (2004), to be literate is about more than reading the word, it’s about engaging in the process of “consciousness-raising,” that is, “the process of actively becoming aware of one’s own position in the world and, importantly, what to do about it” (Alim, 2004: xxiv).
These works and those that follow draw significant inspiration from Lee’s (1993, 2007) evolving theory of cultural modeling, which provides a framework for the design of curriculum that utilizes students’ cultural “funds of knowledge” (Moll et al., 1992) as a source for classroom learning. Ladson-Billings’ (1995, 1998) work on culturally relevant pedagogy and critical race theory in education, as well as Giroux’s (1996) and Dimitriadis’ (2001) work on popular cultural texts in (in) formal learning environments, are also central to this body of work. As Dimitriadis (2001) pointed out a decade ago, school culture has been eclipsed in kids’ lives by
media culture, precisely because media culture provides “models for self-fashioning that are ... now more compelling than the ones offered in traditional schools and through traditional curricula” (p. xi). When taken as a whole, Hip Hop pedagogies have moved beyond “gimmicky” approaches of using Hip Hop culture in the classroom and even more serious culturally relevant approaches by critiquing studies that exploit students’ local cultures, knowledges, and languages only in order to “take them somewhere else.” They view as problematic approaches that teach stu- dents some curricular “standard” or “canon,” without teaching the intrinsic value of students’ ill-literacies (Alim, 2007; Kirkland, 2008; Morrell and Duncan-Andrade, 2004). The field, in general, has moved beyond utilizing specific ill-literacy forms in the classroom (such as Hip Hop, Spoken Word, or other creative literacies) and has begun to centralize students’ lives in an effort to rethink the possibilities of public education. Recall that ILL refers to the notion that literacy instruction must be Intimate, Lived, and Liberatory if schools are to be effective in teaching marginalized populations.
Several recent book-length studies (Desai, 2010; Fisher, 2007; Hill, 2009; Low, 2010) provide models of how we might begin to rethink the purpose of public education and develop illiteracy pedagogies with a more critical, liberatory lens. The students and teacher in Fisher’s (2007) ethnography of an elective, high school Spoken Word poetry class in the Bronx, New York collectively “(re)defined literacy and what it meant to be literate using the medium of Spoken Word poetry” (p. 4). Through utilizing an “open mic” tradition, which is characterized by acts of reciprocity, Fisher described the processes by which teacher and students together built a literocracy by “emphasizing that language processes exist in partnership with action in order to guide young people to develop a passion for words and language” (Fisher, 2005: 92).
Desai’s (2010) ethnographic, teacher-researcher case study of Spoken Word poetry in a weekly after-school elective class in Los Angeles, California built upon Fisher (2005, 2007), Morrell and Duncan-Andrade (2004), and Jocson (2006) and framed Spoken Word as “a site/sight of resistance, reflection and rediscovery” (p. 1). Desai investigated Spoken Word as “a student-centered practice” that provides youth with a safe educational space to examine the world more critically by interrogating issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Desai frames Spoken Word as an “anti-colonial/ decolonizing” literacy practice that privileges “alternative forms of knowledge” by engaging students in “self-reflexive processes” (p. viii).
Hill (2009) and Low (2010) both celebrate the potential of using Hip Hop texts in the classroom, with Hill teaching “Hip Hop Lit,” a Hip Hop-centered English literature class in the evening education program of an alternative high school in South Philadelphia, and with Low co-teaching with and observing a White high school teacher, Tim, who offers a Hip Hop and Spoken Word course in a mid-sized city in the northeastern United States. In Hill’s (2009) terms, these pedagogies “inevitably create spaces of both voice and silence, centering and marginalization, empowerment and domination” (p. 10). Importantly, both Hill and Low push the envelope of “Hip Hop pedagogies,” along with Newman’s (2005) work, by not glossing over the tensions inherent between Hip Hop and schools (Low, 2010: 10). In fact, Low (2010) posits that it is these very real and difficult tensions around the
politics of race, gender, generation, class, and violence, for example, that simultaneously inhibit and demand Hip Hop’s use in schools.
In all of these studies, authors advocate an “intimate” engagement with Hip Hop culture. These pedagogies require particular levels of self-sharing, a process that was carefully negotiated by researchers in all of these studies. Fisher (2007) writes in several places about how her focus teacher (Joe) describes his Spoken Word poetry students as a “family” and the class as a “home,” where students “feed” each other through the reciprocal sharing of their fears, desires, dreams, and nightmares. Joe was often described as a “healer,” whose philosophy of learning connected literacy to “developing one’s full humanity” (p. 91). Similarly, Hill (2009) described the process of “wounded healing,” and Desai’s (2010) students describe the safe space created as a “catharsis” and a space for “healing.” The latter two studies discuss the ways that their classrooms were transformed upon their reciprocating personal narratives of anxiety about becoming fathers, wrestling with poverty, the possibility of abortion, etc. Low (2010) highlights one particular moment in Tim’s class – his genuine, reflexive narration of his internal battle with racism – as the reason that the dynamics of Tim’s classroom improved.
Given the impersonal nature of many of America’s large urban high schools (Noguera, 2003), the focus on intimacy is revolutionary in that it demands that learn- ing occur in safe spaces of reciprocity, mutual respect, and meaningful relationships with youth. All of these studies emphasize that students’ out-of-school lives are filled with struggle, but it is the building of reciprocal, caring relationships that allows students to be vulnerable, sometimes writing about the anxieties of being pregnant, undocumented, stereotyped, devastated by deception, losing loved ones, experiencing violence or abuse from family members or lovers, and other tragedies. Desai (2010) argues that we should not fear intimacy; rather, we should run towards it, as it allows us to view youth not just as students but as human beings with whom we share the world. In addition to intimacy, all of these studies highlight the need to utilize the “lived curriculum” of Hip Hop (Dimitriadis, 2001) in order to access the “lived experiences” of our students. In this way, I argue that recent work builds upon previous literacy studies by viewing students not merely as members of marginalized social groups but as individuals with hopes, fears, anxieties, and complicated lives outside of the classroom.
Finally, these studies view literacy as liberatory, not merely celebratory. For Joe, in Fisher (2007), mastering one’s life story is about re-writing the master narrative about urban youth of color and escaping the “higher mathematics of America” (p. 99) (i.e., the statistics on youth educational failure, imprisonment, etc.). She was not always sure, however, if students understood Joe’s “decolonizing” methodology, and some of their interview responses regarding “Bronxonics” (Joe’s term for the mixed language variety he and his students spoke) betrayed a limited critical language aware- ness, although certainly far greater than traditional approaches (p. 44). Literacy here is liberatory in the sense that it moves far beyond the mechanics of literacy and incor- porates the deeper meanings and relations of literacies to students’ lives. This under- standing of literacy also demands that we focus on ways to help students resist and challenge the forces and discourses that can potentially circumscribe their future possibilities (Gutiérrez, 2008).
HIP HOP AND THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF EDUCATION
In this final section, I want to briefly point to some caveats and then to directions for future studies. There are three main caveats that I would like to address, all of which might prevent ill-literacy studies from falling victim to their own critiques of previous literacy studies. First, there is a widespread tendency for Hip Hop pedagogies to sanitize Hip Hop for inclusion in schools. Many scholars, as pointed out in Low (2010), only use texts that are morally in line with progressive, middle-class, or even bourgeois politics and sensibilities. This is wildly different than an approach that begins with texts that youth, their peers, family, and community members are listen- ing to and creating themselves. Self-selecting “appropriate” texts runs the risk of being outright rejected as “boring,” “ancient,” or “confusing,” which occurred in some of these studies. Perhaps Hip Hop pedagogies could develop a broader, more nuanced understanding of Hip Hop that moves away from sociological and political interpretations which privilege socially and politically “conscious music,” and con- sider instead Perry’s (2004) theorizing of Hip Hop as a rare, democratic space where the sacred sits right alongside the profane, allowing for “open discourse” and prioritizing “expression” over “the monitoring of the acceptable” (pp. 5–6). Thus, rather than selecting Hip Hop texts that align with particular politics and sensibilities, and thereby run the risk of marginalizing students’ interpretations and uses of Hip Hop texts (which Dimitriadis, 2001, and Hill, 2009 have both shown to be impossible to predict), we might begin with explorations of the actual Hip Hop texts that our students make use of in their “lived experiences.” This is critical for anthropology of education’s engagement with Hip Hop.
Second, while all the studies reviewed here are highly receptive to and even laud- atory of Hip Hop texts, there is an apparent unease in some of the studies vis-à-vis the relations between Hip Hop texts and Spoken Word texts that are produced and consumed by youth. Building upon the first caveat, there is some acknowledgement that Spoken Word poetry is an “easier sell” than Hip Hop for schools, but we have to acknowledge the ways that our participation in this trend can make us com- plicit with the uncritical popular discourses that elevate “Spoken Word poetry” over “Hip Hop music,” thereby upholding the false binary of Spoken Word as “intellectual” and “conscious” and Hip Hop as “bling-bling” and “about nothing.” This bifurcating ideology emerges when teachers positively evaluate youth as “poets” when their rhymes align with institutionally-sanctioned behavior, and negatively evaluate them as “rappers” when they don’t. The danger in viewing these forms in this dichotomous fashion is that we undermine the “critical” mission of ill-literacies by demonstrating our own inability to discern popular culture’s contradictory cur- rents, the political economy of the Hip Hop culture industry, and the reductive representations of Black popular culture that have historically accompanied its commodification.
Future ill-literacy studies, my own included, must bear these possible contradictions in mind as we engage this very difficult, tense terrain of popular culture in the classroom. Second, there is a need for future studies to show more than the product of their success (such as student writing, poetry, and affirmation of researchers’
curricula through interviews) but also process (analyses of the difficult negotiation of teaching and learning the emerging curriculum). Several of these studies have done that well, but there is a need for more analysis of classroom interaction through discourse analytic techniques that examine, for example, not just that safe, critical spaces were achieved, but how and when we either were or were not successful in creating them. Illuminating cultural and educational processes is a central concern for the anthropology of education and needs further development in relation to Hip Hop practices.
In conclusion, the possibilities of global ill-literacies lie both in the politics and pedagogies of youth texts created largely outside of schools, and in our ability to create pedagogies inside schools that center the texts that our youth use, create, and manipulate in their daily lives. As this chapter has shown, the everyday pedagogies of Hip Hop range from the deliberate teaching of language mixing (Sarkar, 2007) and the focused learning of BESL in Canadian Hip Hop (Ibrahim, 2003), to the importing and transforming of various ideologies of race and inequality in new contexts (Pennycook and Mitchell, 2009; Roth-Gordon, 2009), to the articulation and contestation of multiple new identities in anticolonial resistive practices (Higgins, 2009; Omoniyi, 2009), to the pervasive process of localizing globally available cultural and linguistic forms (Alim, Ibrahim, and Pennycook, 2009). These examples not only create new possibilities for the theorizing of youth culture and language, they also demonstrate how teaching and learning happen in everyday life, even as we explore new ways to harness these processes in formal educational settings. The examples shared in this chapter open up new ways for us to think about education as both a process of the everyday and the everywhere, that is, learning through popular and everyday cultural practice across contexts, and as the specific processes of teaching and learning that occur in schools and classrooms.
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